Ice Skating

Ice Skating

This was a group planned activity just before we broke up for christmas holidays. This was planned for our CAS programme so that we could try a new activity and learn a new skill. Until then I had only Ice Skated a few times, however I expected to pick up the skill fairly quickly, so I was excited to go on this trip. This activity I saw as part of the action part of CAS. This is because of the physical skill needed to ice skate and as what we were doing was not that physically hard, it did take concentration and physical skill to learn.

Objectives

My first objective for this trip was obviously to further my Ice Skating abilities and really just learn the skill. I wanted to be able to learn how to ice skate fluently. After I had learned that I thought that it would be good for me to learn other kinds of skills of ice skating as going backwards and doing a 180 turn and stopping. All these things I was hoping to learn on this trip and was eager to get started.

Assesment

To my surprise I noticed that I was able to pick up the skill of ice skating fairly quickly and was able to move around the rink in no time and without any difficulties. I then learnt how to slow down which was easy for me as one only had to drag ones right or left foot along the ice to start slowing down and eventually stopping. After this I then started learning the next move. This was my biggest surprise, I managed a 180 in the first three tries and then after that I could do them fairly consistently at relatively low speeds. However I did not manage to learn how to fluently travel backwards on my skates. I was really surprised how quickly I picked up the ice skating skill, however I linked this to my part of skating that I do and roller blading that I used to do a few years back, I noticed how much different activities link in to each other and how one can transcribe physical skills that you learnt once before onto other sports. I noticed the muscle memory that I had had from roller blading a few years back sticked with me, it was like learning to ride a bike, once you had learnt it, it did not really leave you. this made me think about other things like the skating I was doing, as I normally am put off trying to learn totally new things, however now I have a different mindset about it, so I thought about surfing and snowboarding, it really opened many doors to me noticing this and I appreciated the activity for this and therefore that it was a total success, also in bringing everyone together and doing an activity together, it was quite a bonding activity as one had to help each other out to learn new skills and really further ones ability, that is really what I enjoyed, receiving and giving help.